Sometimes contrarian, sometimes controversial, Kennedy’s arguments merit consideration in a riven discourse.
A collection of essays on Black politics and history by a noted legal scholar.
Early on, Harvard Law School professor Kennedy observes that “social relations are complex and messy.” This is true, and people are complex and messy as well. One of Kennedy’s subjects, for example, is Frederick Douglass, who transformed himself from “racial pessimist” to “the most remarkable racial optimist in American history,” having first viewed the Constitution as a thinly disguised instrument of slavery and then taken the view that, under the influence of William Lloyd Garrison, the document was actually anti-slavery in nature, at least in part. Language changes, too. Having lived through several eras, Kennedy calls himself a “Black/Negro/Colored/African American” man born in the year of Brown v. Board of Education. In an essay that is certain to raise consternation among some readers, Kennedy defends the use of the N-word “for pedagogical purposes,” writing, “I am simply unwilling to defer to arbiters of opinion who, armed with superficial knowledge, rigidly insist that this or that term is correct or incorrect in the face of a rich and complicated historical record that reveals a wide pattern of usages.” He adds that a lawyer distracted by the ugly language of the N-word or similar racial slurs “is a lawyer with a gaping vulnerability.” Other pieces that are less likely to invite debate concern the role of policing in Black neighborhoods. In Kennedy's view, the problem is less the police per se than “poorly regulated police” whose role is to threaten and control more than to protect and serve. Some of the pieces are of a historical survey nature: telling readers who Elijah Muhammad was, reviewing the runaway slave law of the pre–Civil War era, and so forth. They are less memorable than the author’s denunciations of “antiracism gone awry” and small-step racial justice laws that “are attentive to the pluralism that infuses American practices.”
Sometimes contrarian, sometimes controversial, Kennedy’s arguments merit consideration in a riven discourse.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-31604-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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